Hugh sawrey biography

Biography A figurative impressionist painter of the outback along with Pro Hart, Sawrey is arguably one of Australia's greatest bush painters. Undoubtedly he is one of the best-ever painters of the horse. When he exhibited at the Tryon Gallery I, London the directors listed him in the top ten horse painters of the world. Sawrey was true to the tradition of history painting in Australia.

It wasn't the epic poems of the Greeks that inspired him but Australian bush-poets. It wasn't high moral values that were espoused but the values of mateship and it wasn't the heroism and valour in long ago battles. Rather, it was the heroic effort to wrest a livelihood from the unyielding Queensland outback. No stranger to the hardship of the Australian outback, Sawrey worked for many years as a stockman droving and mustering out past the Cooper and Diamantina, and as far west as W.

Drought took his own mob of cattle in and he nearly broke his hugh sawrey biography splitting posts, ring-barking and clearing with his mother, on a small property of their own, a property too small, too harsh and unyielding. He scribbled sketches and painted on anything that he could find. The hotel was demolished in to make way for Post Office Square but the murals were saved by architecture student Colin Barnett.

Among his portraits was a painting of a well endowed and blowsy woman which he submitted to the first Johnsonian Club Art Prize in Despite his later disavowal of publicity Sawrey further established his profile as an artist by contributing sketches to an exhibition for a Miss Australia Quest entrant, Geraldine Roffery. Keith Moore at the Grand Central Gallery became his dealer in and offered Sawrey his first solo exhibition the following year.

He occasionally painted other portraits in later rears. They had two sons, Jon and Tony. It was here that he painted a series based on the life of Ned Kelly. Sawrey lamented: 'In the Forties in the Channel Country it was mainly horse work. Sawrey was an artist whose prolific output of paintings, and drawings of the Australian landscape and its people contributed in a profound way to the preserving of the memory of times and places in Australian history that were in danger of being overlooked and lost to posterity.

Throughout his long career, he experienced firsthand events that shaped Australian identity in the 20th century and documented through his work many of the characters that lived in this period. His father, a teamster died when Hugh was only three years old.

Hugh sawrey biography

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Together with his mother and older brother Alan, Hugh moved to Brisbane in the early s. However, he left school when he was 15 and began working in outback Queensland to assist his family during the Great Depression. He worked a multitude of jobs from droving to shearingtravelling extensively throughout the interior of Queenslandthe Northern Territory and Western Australia.

After his discharge at the end of the war Sawrey used his service pay to buy a mob of cattle which he ran on a small property on the Darling Downs with his mother.